Small Goals and Big Failures
As a follow on to yesterday’s post, I read something related today. It was a short article basically saying that sometimes doing easy things is harder than doing hard things. When you’re trying to get into something new like exercise or learning something, I think people tend to “throw themselves into it” as they say, meaning they allocate lots of time and effort and often times money into this new thing.
I have countless examples in my life and in the lives of people that I know who have spent so much effort getting into something new, and then after about half a year to a year later, they never touch it again. I’m tempted to talk about my friends and their failures, but let’s talk about my own instead.
I wanted to get into club racing for awhile and after a couple months of pondering it, I decided that the fastest way to get involved was to buy an old, cheap car that I wouldn’t mind beating up and taking it to a racing event. So that’s exactly what I did. I searched craigslist postings, car forum postings, asked friends and eventually I ended up with a $1200 POS car, but it was my ticket to the start of my illustrious racing career. Forget the fact that the car was already dying and was in need of some serious replacement parts, I let it sit for a couple months during the winter and then when the first event came around, I drove that car 8 hours and crossed two state lines to be at one of the first events of the season, you know, to get a head start.
Well, so it happens, the drive out was fine and the event went ok except for the fact that I did terribly. But by the time I got that car back home, after 16 hours of driving, with about 5 hours of punishment added on, the car was out for the count. Of course, that didn’t stop me from buy some performance parts for it, like a $900 suspension upgrade that me and my friend spent a whole morning installing. What I should have done was spent that $900 replacing all the broken parts on it.
Long story short, I only took the car out for a couple practices before deciding that it wasn’t worth keeping or repairing since it would just be a constant drain on my wallet. Luckily, I found another rising star with dreams in of racing fame, and they took the car off my hands for $1200. Thus I lost my $900 suspension and whatever else I put into it to pass inspection.
So, I threw myself into it and failed miserably.
Getting back to my point, I had no trouble dumping my money into my new hobby and driving an entire day for the sake of it. But when it comes to things like blogging everyday, or running everyday, though hard in their own way, I still managed to get thrown off track after small distractions arose. This explains why I ended up joining a gym and signing up for a 60 mile charity bike ride; they’re bigger and more expensive than just running everyday. Damn, now that I’m writing this, I’m worried that those will end in great failure as well.
Oh well, more lessons to be learned. Maybe next month I’ll start with even lower goals, things that I can do everyday that are foolproof. If I can accomplish smaller tasks on a consistent and committed basis, then I can slowly move up to bigger and greater things. Maybe I’ll start with things like, saying hello to someone in the elevator, or cleaning my room for 5 minutes everyday. You gotta start somewhere right? Like I said yesterday, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a small step.
